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Once you see the amount of food waste you start feeling cheated. Like, you pay top dollar for some greens and then you see tons of the same exact greens being d
by dauertewigkeit 3y ago
Once you see the amount of food waste you start feeling cheated. Like, you pay top dollar for some greens and then you see tons of the same exact greens being dumped in a dumpster at the end of the day.
The food itself is not worth the price you are paying for it. It's the service and the logistics that you are paying for. If everybody paid the dumpster price the supermarket would fail.
It would be cool if there were business models where this was made more explicit.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> food itself is not worth the price you are paying for it...the service and the logistics that you are paying for It's the mass production and constant availability. (Also logistics.) Subsistence farming works great until a drought. Put another way, the waste lets the fresh produce be cheap. (That doesn't mean we can't do something better with it than drop it in a dumpster.) > If everybody paid the dumpster price the supermarket would fail. It would be cool if there were business models where this was made more explicit. If everyone paid the dumpster price, there wouldn't be any food in the dumpster.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoExactly. There is an optimal amount of spoilage to maximize the amount of actually consumed produce and minimize the cost.
- rthomas6 3y ago> Subsistence farming works great until a drought. Maybe we should do this by default and fall back onto the global supply chain when there is a drought.
- fomine3 3y ago"Fallback" to unprepared infrastructure doesn't work.
- armchairhacker 3y agoIt’s still not an excuse to throw the food away. Some supermarkets donate all of their excess food to pantries. Supermarkets have trouble paying their employees a decent wage, why can’t they let employees take X amount of leftover items? Some people don’t get enough food, many more do but would rather spend less and not be picky. They would be happy to take the remaining leftovers before they spoil, especially food like produce (whereas junk food, fortunately in this case, tends to last much longer so it doesn’t get wasted). A lot of places actually do this, which shows that it’s a real solution; I don’t really see why all can’t.
- Ekaros 3y agoYou are paying also for that wasted food. Availability is a part of the price. The excess to be there so you can buy the quantity you need.
- HPsquared 3y agoThe food isn't worth as much at the end of the day I guess... limited shelf life. There's always frozen / processed food I guess!
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> frozen / processed food Fresh produce was historically a delicacy. Most agrarian diets consisted of preserved food. The modern phenomenon of year-round fresh produce is a luxury. (Albeit a welcome one.)
- HPsquared 3y agoMeat every day as well... We do have it pretty good.
- ip26 3y agoBy this angle, clean water, indoor plumbing, vaccines and hospitals are also a luxury.
- lbotos 3y agoUh, they are? Clearly, you are taking them for granted, but these things are absolutely a luxury. There is a website that I cannot remember off-hand that shows you if you make more than like $5 a day you are in some top echelon. There is another that shows you what different material objects (plates, toothbrushes etc) look like across the world at different income levels. If anyone knows do share.
- Hackbraten 3y ago> There is another that shows you what different material objects (plates, toothbrushes etc) look like across the world at different income levels. Could that be Dollar Street? [1] [1]: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- worldsayshi 3y agoEconomy issues aside. I'm more concerned about the ecology of it. What happens to the dumpster food? Before agriculture food that wasn't used just ended up on the forest floor and got reused. I wonder what happens to all the food waste in terms of numbers. I guess most of it either gets burnt or rot away on a dump site?
- brutusborn 3y agoStraight to landfill where it decomposes to methane. If you’re lucky your landfill has a fancy new methane harvesting system; if not, straight to atmosphere.
- actionfromafar 3y agoPlus all fossil fertiliser used to produce the food.
- mistrial9 3y ago> If you’re lucky your landfill luck has nothing to do with it at all.. There are many kinds of landfills and many jurisdictions. Every person in every part of the world reading these words has services related to that. Methane release, and the economics of the waste services, deserve, no demand, intelligent insight right now, despite low-economic incentives.
- smileysteve 3y agoAnd in either case, the water and acid content combines with other waste to create leachate that eats the plastic barrier, so that the toxic waste then ruins the aquifer.
- hammock 3y ago>Once you see the amount of food waste you start feeling cheated. Like, you pay top dollar for some greens and then you see tons of the same exact greens being dumped in a dumpster at the end of the day. The food itself is not worth the price you are paying for it. It's the service and the logistics that you are paying for. That's true. It's also true that growing your own greens at home could probably cost even more, all things considered. Weird paradox.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoAccess to healthy greens is a utility, like water: not much profit but scale is important.
- brightball 3y agoI've always wanted to see a grocery store where the prices decrease the closer the item is to its expiration date.
- Larrikin 3y agoJapanese grocery stores do this with meat and packaged meals. It's not always the best strategy as nearly all the good stuff is gone by the time they start discounting and you will consistently be getting food well after a reasonable dinner time.
- fomine3 3y agoIt's common so there's even an anime for it, Ben-to.
- hammock 3y agoThese exist. Or grocery stores have outlets ("day-old" etc) where you can buy the near-expiry or expired goods.
- JackFr 3y agoA place I used to go to had a 'Meat priced for quick sale' bin. Kind of a crap shoot, but I've got a bit of an iron gut and the steaks were like 2/3 off.
- pcl 3y agoThis is common in grocery stores in Oslo. It’s a great place to go when you’re ready for some serendipitous dinner planning.
- vel0city 3y agoIn college the grocer near me had NY strip steaks for like $2/lb one day. Tons of it. I thought I hit the jackpot, and decided to throw a big grill out party with a lot of friends. I probably had a dozen people waiting for some awesome steaks. They were all absolutely terrible, some of the worst cuts of meat I think I ever had. Quite a disaster. Fun times though.
- turing_complete 3y agoThat doesn't make sense. Of course you're paying for the logistics and service to get the food. Otherwise you would not get the food. The food wouldn't even exist.
- ygjb 3y agoThat's the point. As consumers we pay the cost of logistics and service, but we also pay for the waste. We aren't paying the cost of a head of lettuce, we are paying the cost of a head of lettuce, plus a fractional cost of waste produce. From an economic perspective we are paying for the risk the retailer takes in bringing a product with a short shelf life to market. Grocers offset some of this risk by processing some of the food onsite, selling precooked meals, premade salads, etc. If it was more profitable to further reduce costs, then they would, but there are diminishing returns on end of the line food processing, since the kitchens and packaging required are generalized for a broad range of foods instead of being a specialized operation that is more efficient. It sucks, but it's the system that capital built, and pretty much the only thing we can do if we don't like it is to focus on buying local, or electing politicians who will target food waste as a policy.
- sokoloff 3y agoI think it's the system that biology built. Fresh food spoils. Always has. Happens less now with readily available refrigeration, salt, and fast long-distance logistics. Those supply chain improvements make it more feasible to produce a lot of it and have a wide variety available almost without regard to season. Ever since people farmed, they put in all the labor and got out only the portion of product that they could use without spoiling. That's how we got canning, bread, cheese, beer/wine, and other means to preserve the caloric content of agricultural products.
- Eisenstein 3y agoBut there is no biological reason people in the north eastern United States should be able eat fresh oranges and pineapples in December. That is not natural. It is because of financial incentives that it is possible, and it also creates a lot of waste as a byproduct.
- c22 3y agoAt a Fedex copy center it costs over $2 a page to send a fax but only 20 cents a page to make a copy. Same machine, same amount of time spent monopolizing said machine, but at the end of the photocopying you walk away with a physical piece of paper they will have to restock ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- hammock 3y agoThe fax machine prints out a confirmation page, though doesn't it?
- c22 3y agoYou can send the confirmation to email.
- wincy 3y agoHah yes I needed to send a fax to the government for my disabled daughter’s medical benefits and it would have been $70 at UPS. I couldn’t believe it. I sent it certified mail for $6 instead.
- c22 3y agoTurns out the library here will send faxes for free.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoConsider https://www.phaxio.com/ https://www.phaxio.com/ for future fax needs. Like Twilio for faxes. No association besides using it when a fax is required for a use case. A few cents per page and can use curl: https://www.phaxio.com/features/ https://www.phaxio.com/features/
- popcalc 3y agovoip.ms is great if you need virtual fax.
- sidewndr46 3y agoMost things are not worth what you pay for it. That is the definition of profit. If something is sold exactly at the cost to make it, there would be no profit. If you realized how high profits are on things like cars and cell phones, you'd have the same opinion of those
- datavirtue 3y agoLast I heard it cost ~$5000 to make a Toyota Camry.
- asdff 3y agoI wonder how much they cost to make when they were sold for that much new in 1990?
- Projectiboga 3y agoHere in Manhattan, NYC, we have tiers of produce. I can pay $5 for strawberries that could last for some days. Or I can go to one of the fruit stands which has better than average strawberries for $1 and eat half that evening and most of the rest for breakfast and lunch. I might not get 100% good ones but the value is there. I've seen places w tired but very cheep produce out in Brooklyn. I've read about a cohort here called 'freegans' who stake out places at the time the expired prepared stuff is put out on the street, that isn't scalable but a few w mental disabilities, addictions or just starving nonconformists do it.
- diebeforei485 3y agoNYC is a bit of a special case. Regulation makes it hard to operate a larger supermarket, regulation generally makes it so all produce coming into NYC has to spend time coming through Hunts Point. Go to any supermarket across the river in New Jersey and you'll have vastly higher quality produce.
- ghostDancer 3y agoYou forget the middlemen and I don't mean the trucker, I mean the one that gets all the markup paying low to the producer and selling high to the shopkeeper.
- refurb 3y agoSomeone has to move the produce from farm to market, no? Transportation is a not insignificant cost of the food chain. Nothing stops farmers from transporting it themselves and capturing that part of the value chain.
- jameshart 3y agoYou’re paying for the logistics and service that ensures that at least as much of that food as people might want to buy, is available at the time they want to buy it. You paid for the food you bought, plus the convenience of it being there when you wanted it. Which means you also paid for the cost of the stuff that was left on the shelf at the end of the day too. If you want to be able to walk into a supermarket at closing time and still have a choice of things to buy, then you want supermarkets to have waste.
- elzbardico 3y agoWe have made a trade-off here. In exchange for the scale gains of living in big cities we have to accept the fact that food distribution is going to always have some degree of waste and the logistic costs themselves are going to be dominant.
- mcpackieh 3y ago> Like, you pay top dollar for some greens When people say things like this, or about how expensive it is to eat healthy, I feel like I'm in a twilight zone episode where the grocery stores I walk into exist in an alternate universe from their own. Buying produce is the cheapest way you can eat, it's the cheapest food in the grocery store. Cheaper than anything in the frozen / processed foods aisles. Fresh produce is one of the cheapest things you can possibly buy period. For the price of one bag of chips you can buy enough potatoes to feed you for a week.
- coding123 3y agoIt's the same with software - the electronics in use when we create a Jira ticket, or all of the electrons in use for all the Jira activity for an entire year of you building your product probably costs $0.15. Maybe storage and history and uptime - but Jira (cloud) that cost is shared. What you're really paying for is the ongoing development of Jira. (Not looking for hate on Jira - just an example).